jpahmad Posted August 8, 2015 Posted August 8, 2015 Why is this entity assumed to be separate from the person? (with person, I mean the whole body of the person, including the brain.) It's not assumed to be separate. The point is that people who say they are not responsible for their actions separate the entity themselves by uttering that very sentence. If I say "The person in this location that is writing this now do not understand the logic from the person in the location that wrote the post that is quoted.", Did I make a split entity fallacy? No Also, I am genuinely interested in what happens with your logic when this occurs: What occurred?
A4E Posted August 9, 2015 Posted August 9, 2015 What occurred? In the video below the sentence there is a robot using words like "I" and "my". Just curious what happens then. Does it make a split entity fallacy? I guess i'm wondering if there are restrictions on who or what can make these split entity fallacies.
jpahmad Posted August 9, 2015 Posted August 9, 2015 In the video below the sentence there is a robot using words like "I" and "my". Just curious what happens then. Does it make a split entity fallacy? I guess i'm wondering if there are restrictions on who or what can make these split entity fallacies. It's fine that the robot speaks like a human and says "I" and "my". No fallacy there. I suppose if the robot did something like, kick a ball, and then immediately after said the sentence "I didn't do that", that would be a split entity fallacy.
A4E Posted August 9, 2015 Posted August 9, 2015 As you meet each day and struggle with the choices presented to you in your life, do your decisions come without effort, or do you ponder, reflect, struggle? This is free will. How deep does your struggle go? Do your decisions arise as an effect of the emotion of the moment, or are they subjected to an external standard and experience? This is free will. Do you ever question your choices or are you 100% sold on every thought that pops into your head? Could you have done any differently in the past? If we use the definition of free will that you explained in your post, would you say that most animals have this free will? Would you also say that a lot of insects might have this free will? If not, how about apes, monkeys, lions, elephants, dolphins? It doesn't seem to matter. From a practical application of the theory of free will or determinism, where it matters in our immediate experience, we have free will. To look retrospectively at whether someone could have chosen otherwise seems similar to ask the question "What if... Magic?" The present moment is where we all live. We can have wildly differing degrees of insight into our own decision making processes and I think this is where the variability of free will exists. It doesn't seem adequate to characterize this experience and physical occurrence into what most feel are mutually exclusive concepts. The question seems to be analogous to asking what is 5+3+7+2.354847234? We can discard the decimals. We are apes with language, how we approach problem solving and attempt to understand that which is not immediately apparent seems to be what matters. A term adopted as a conclusion one way or the other feels like counting angels on the head of a pin. I think determinism exists... Right next to God in a parallel universe where we will never have any tangible contact. Long live free will. No determinist will disagree that humans are incredibly complex, just as all other intelligent animals are complex, but perhaps not as much as humans. It is the idea of a free will that contains superpowers, so for you to compare determinism with a God, is misplaced imo.
AnarcoB Posted August 9, 2015 Posted August 9, 2015 Okay. I accept determinism as a rational description of how matter and energy interact. I don't believe consciousness is anything more than this. To say I have to choose the popular definition of determinism or free will and all of the baggage and narrow conclusions drawn from these definitions is not treating the issue with the degree of care it deserves. Determinism exists, yet the entirety of all human experience is that we have free will. That was my point, and I think I made it fairly clearly enough to not be misunderstood.
Frosty Posted August 12, 2015 Posted August 12, 2015 Just for the record I think it's really extremely bad form for a board on philosophy to have banned free will and determinism discussion, and since in some ways it's threatening to a libertarian position that makes it even more suspect. The science is increasingly more certain on this, the world behave deterministically on large scales, and a lot of the major scientists such as theoretical physicists are saying that free will in the classical sense is basically an illusion. There's several really good arguments for determinism that come out of physics and not just brand new quantum physics but well established things like the special theory of relativity which infers that space time is a 4D object and which exists at all points and therefore the future is fixed, time is not absolute but relative which means observers depending on their motion can in theory observe events in the future from the perspective of other individuals. Look up the plane of simultaneity to get a good idea for how this works. I'm somewhat of a compatibalist, I think that certain notions of free will are compatible with the idea of a deterministic universe but probably not the kind of free will that most people are thinking of, it depends how you define free will. I think the limit of our ability to make choices is that our brain is going to make the same choice given the same input so we make choices in the sense that it occurs in the mechanics of our brain, but the brain cannot produce 2 different outputs (decisions) for the same input (stimulus) it can only ever produce 1 output which is the decision you make or the action you take. There's a lot of advancements in neuroscience that prove that unconscious parts of our brain make decisions before the conscious part is aware of them, it's the conscious part of the brain which is our experience of spontaneously making these decisions when in reality we're not, this is now super easy to prove. This suggests we have neural architecture which is set up to fool ourselves into feeling we have control and the freedom of choice, and certainly most people who discuss free will would like to think that our decision making if it's in our control at all has to come from the conscious part of the brain that is our moment to moment experience, if you have no "control" over your subconscious and how it makes decisions before they arrive in you stream of consciousness then this is no more classical free will than a deterministic brain. Again I think the outright banning of determinism and related talk on a philosophy board is extremely bad form, there should be no discussions in philosophy that are banned especially for ones which are so hotly contested by both sides, the arguments about waste of space and bandwidth on the server and alike are extremely pathetic in my opinion.
Agalloch Posted August 12, 2015 Posted August 12, 2015 Just for the record I think it's really extremely bad form for a board on philosophy to have banned free will and determinism discussion, and since in some ways it's threatening to a libertarian position that makes it even more suspect. The science is increasingly more certain on this, the world behave deterministically on large scales, and a lot of the major scientists such as theoretical physicists are saying that free will in the classical sense is basically an illusion. There's several really good arguments for determinism that come out of physics and not just brand new quantum physics but well established things like the special theory of relativity which infers that space time is a 4D object and which exists at all points and therefore the future is fixed, time is not absolute but relative which means observers depending on their motion can in theory observe events in the future from the perspective of other individuals. Look up the plane of simultaneity to get a good idea for how this works. I'm somewhat of a compatibalist, I think that certain notions of free will are compatible with the idea of a deterministic universe but probably not the kind of free will that most people are thinking of, it depends how you define free will. I think the limit of our ability to make choices is that our brain is going to make the same choice given the same input so we make choices in the sense that it occurs in the mechanics of our brain, but the brain cannot produce 2 different outputs (decisions) for the same input (stimulus) it can only ever produce 1 output which is the decision you make or the action you take. There's a lot of advancements in neuroscience that prove that unconscious parts of our brain make decisions before the conscious part is aware of them, it's the conscious part of the brain which is our experience of spontaneously making these decisions when in reality we're not, this is now super easy to prove. This suggests we have neural architecture which is set up to fool ourselves into feeling we have control and the freedom of choice, and certainly most people who discuss free will would like to think that our decision making if it's in our control at all has to come from the conscious part of the brain that is our moment to moment experience, if you have no "control" over your subconscious and how it makes decisions before they arrive in you stream of consciousness then this is no more classical free will than a deterministic brain. Again I think the outright banning of determinism and related talk on a philosophy board is extremely bad form, there should be no discussions in philosophy that are banned especially for ones which are so hotly contested by both sides, the arguments about waste of space and bandwidth on the server and alike are extremely pathetic in my opinion. Or, put shorter. Free will isn't real, therefore you were bad for using your free will to decide what to do with your forum. And other unjustified assertions.
A4E Posted August 14, 2015 Posted August 14, 2015 Tbh, just picking this one contradiction was incredibly difficult, Could you please explain how the word "bad" contains moral responsibility? Or explain the contradiction you wanted to point out? your article is completely invalid at almost every point I know I make some strong claims in the article, and I recognize that they might possibly be wrong, but this sentence of yours is not an argument. , however as your main point seems to be that moral responsibility doesn't exist, this example of you giving moral responsibility to one if the non-protected classes is pretty important. I did not give free will moral responsibility to anyone in the article. I gave instructions on how to have a peaceful society, because everyone implicitely agree that we need a peaceful society. Perhaps you should find out what moral responsibility is by the way? That you think it might have anything to do with the responsibility of a writer for a reader pulling on his own hair is a straw man at best and poisoning the well with arsenic at worst. I did provide a definition of my own in the article. But please tell me what you see as moral responsibility, so that we are not talking about 2 different things. For example, would you agree that noone is morally responsible in a hard deterministic universe? The pulling of hair was ment to be a lighthearted humorous transition. Tl;dr as always with these "scientific" determinist arguments, you take away moral culpability from the protected classes, I don't understand "protected classes" but you require (its the very reason you wrote an article) that everybody else is even more morally culpable than ever. No I did not. You might be conflicting free will moral responsibility with instructions. Maybe you did not understand what I was trying to say in the article. You want to stay alive right? And you need to eat and sleep in order to stay alive, because if you do not, you will die. We want a peaceful society right? And we need to keep bad people away from society in order to have peace, because if we do not, we will not have a peaceful society. Did you read the summary in the article? Do you disagree with anything in the summary?
Agalloch Posted August 14, 2015 Posted August 14, 2015 Could you please explain how the word "bad" contains moral responsibility 1 1
Agalloch Posted August 19, 2015 Posted August 19, 2015 Could you please explain how the word "bad" contains moral responsibility Haha, this is my favourite thing to be voted down for so far. I quote insanity, with no comment and get voted down while the original post which was full of false assertions, tautologies like this and served only to be argumentative got, no negative votes. 1 1
shirgall Posted August 19, 2015 Posted August 19, 2015 Haha, this is my favourite thing to be voted down for so far. I quote insanity, with no comment and get voted down while the original post which was full of false assertions, tautologies like this and served only to be argumentative got, no negative votes. Fixed
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